Bing Crosby gave the necessary 'VC' funding to start production of tape recorders with sufficient fidelity to pre-record his radio show.
He was motivated by 'laziness': he wanted to spend more time at home or playing golf than the strict schedules of a weekly live radio broadcast permitted.
Ever notice a lot of automation and innovations are motivated by laziness. Maybe not laziness in the sense of to lazy to do something, but in the sense of it is so mundane i don't want to do it.
You need to compare it to someone inventing something like a windmill. In ancient times, someone was crushing grain with a rock. Pretty tedious work for little reward. Then someone figured out a way to use a bigger rock by rolling it. Then they hooked a mule up to it. Then they hooked up bunch of vanes so the entire process was automated. No on had to feed the mule or move the rock. The process isn't really a product of laziness, its a product of how you can be more productive with your resources.
The time you put into building better tools is an investment into your productivity. You could sit there and manually edit spreadsheets for eight hours or you could spend a couple hours writing a tool to crank through them in ten seconds and you can move on to another task. As long as it takes less time to build the tool than the cumulative time of completing that task and any future similar tasks the tool could be used for, you have progressed just the same as early man did making tools.
> According to Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris
> Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
Here's a interview with Jack Mullin where he recalls the time he almost took a wrong turn on his way to liberating the two Magnetophon elements that eventually transformed AMPEX from a wartime motor manufacturer to the cornerstone of Silicon Valley it would eventually become: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olg5OMBil84
> Adolf Hitler used these machines to perform what appeared to be live broadcasts from one city while he was in another. A cache of 350 of these tapes was released years later when they were found in Koblenz.
> Magnetophon recorders were widely used in German radio broadcasts during World War II, although they were a closely guarded secret at the time. The Allies were aware of the existence of the pre-war Magnetophon recorders, but not of the introduction of high-frequency bias and PVC-backed tape.)[9] their intelligence experts knew that the Germans had some new form of recording system but they did not know the full details of its construction and operation until working models of the Magnetophon were discovered during the Allied invasion of Germany during 1944-45.
> American audio engineer Jack Mullin acquired two Magnetophon recorders and fifty reels of magnetic tape from a German radio station at Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt in 1945. The allied forces were traveling through Germany during WWII when they first discovered the device. The Allies then handed the Magnetophon over to Mullin.[10] Over the next two years Mullin modified and developed these machines, hoping to create a commercial recording system that could be used by movie studios. American popular vocalist Bing Crosby...
I also recommend "Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony" where Morita recounts the early days after the war of what became Sony. They decided early on to develop a tape player and it is interesting to read the crazy things they tried, having no domestic source of tape and almost no resources, working in a bombed-out area of Tokyo. It took them several years to develop tape and then a recorder, and eventually they developed the expertise to make smaller and smaller devices culminating in the Walkman.
As an aside, Steve Jobs was an admirer of Morita and the Sony Walkman could be seen as a precursor to the Apple iPod. Also Apple's efforts to make ever-thinner and compact devices could also be related back to the Sony efforts to make ever-smaller and compact devices, this being perceived as a key part their success during Morita's time.
He was motivated by 'laziness': he wanted to spend more time at home or playing golf than the strict schedules of a weekly live radio broadcast permitted.